Warning: Video contains graphic language. A video from June 14, 2018, posted on social media appears to show a Cook County Forest Preserves police officer failing to help a woman being harassed by a man for wearing a shirt with a Puerto Rican flag at Caldwell Woods on Chicago's Far Northwest Side. (Facebook)

Warning: Video contains graphic language. A video from June 14, 2018, posted on social media appears to show a Cook County Forest Preserves police officer failing to help a woman being harassed by a man for wearing a shirt with a Puerto Rican flag at Caldwell Woods on Chicago's Far Northwest Side. (Facebook)

In this time of widespread disagreement, I hope we can all agree that the actions of Timothy Trybus, the Chicago man seen worldwide in a viral video harassing and screaming at a woman wearing a Puerto Rican flag T-shirt, were hateful.

The woman was at Caldwell Woods Forest Preserve preparing for a birthday party when the 62-year-old Trybus approached and said she shouldn’t be wearing the shirt in America, menacingly and ignorantly asking: “Are you a citizen?”

He followed her around the covered picnic area, getting in her face and clearly trying to intimidate her. The incident, which happened in June, was captured on video that surfaced online Monday, allowing the world to see Trybus’ vitriol.

On Thursday, the right thing happened. Trybus was arrested and charged with two counts of felony hate crime, an upgrade of the initial charges against him, which were misdemeanor assault and misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

It’ll now be up to a judge or jury to decide whether Trybus’ actions that day rise to the level of a hate crime. But I certainly hope we can all agree the actions were hateful, and not the type of behavior decent people in this country should tolerate.

If we agree on that, we’d also be wise to examine things happening in this country right now that can give rise to that sort of hatred.

U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez applauded the hate crime charges and said: “There should be consequences. People have to learn there are consequences, especially in the era of Trump. I really do believe there are people who say to themselves, ‘If Trump can do it, I can do it. Why can’t I go out there and say the things the president says?’”

Here’s where we might not all agree, but I beg those who don’t want to see this lone Chicago incident connected to President Donald Trump to at least consider that Gutierrez might have a point.

We can’t draw a direct line between Trump’s hostility toward immigrants and Trybus’ heinous behavior. We won’t know the genesis of Trybus’ assault on this woman — or his apparent lack of knowledge that people from Puerto Rico are American citizens — until he speaks publicly or it comes out at trial.

But if we agree that what happened in that forest preserve pavilion is a very bad thing, we should also agree that it’s a bad thing for a president to be promoting the kind of anti-immigrant, us-vs.-them thinking that might lead a 62-year-old man to harass an innocent woman wearing a Puerto Rican flag T-shirt.

One of the most telling things Trybus said to the woman in his rant was this: “You’re not going to change us, you know that? The world is not going to change the United State of America.”

That’s a central fear among white nationalists, the alt-right, racists or whatever you want to call them: Immigrants are coming to America and fundamentally changing the country, moving it away from what they believe are its white, European roots.

A common phrase in those crowds is that we are “losing our culture.”

Here’s something Trump said this week to the British newspaper The Sun, talking about immigration in Europe: “I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was. … I think you are losing your culture.”

Others who share that kind of thinking include white supremacists like David Duke and Richard Spencer, both vocal Trump supporters. Spencer, speaking about America, told the Los Angeles Times in 2016: “We live in a multi-cultural country where currently, European Americans are being dispossessed. It’s happening very slowly… We’re being demographically dispossessed. We’re losing our culture, we’re losing our sense of being.”

That’s nonsense. America is a country of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures.

But the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to paint immigrants as nefarious “others,” interlopers who are changing America, robbing it of its culture.

It’s not that big a leap from government-promoted xenophobia to the actions of a man like Trybus.

We can agree his actions were despicable, I hope.

But it’s critical for us to also agree that words and thoughts being expressed by people in America right now, people with voices that reach millions, can contribute to such despicable actions.

The right thing happened when prosecutors decided to charge Trybus with a hate crime.

The better thing would have been for his hatred to never take seed in the first place.